The Power of Talk

The Povver

by Deborah Tannen

The head of a large division of a multinational corporation was running a meeting devoted to per­ formance assessment. Each senior manager stood up, reviewed the individuals in his group, and eval­ uated them for promotion. Although there were women in every group, not one of them made the cut. One after another, each manager declared, in effect, that every woman in his group didn't have the self-confidence needed to be promoted. The di­ vision head began to doubt his ears. How could it be that all the talented women in the division suffered from a lack of self-confidence? In allli'kelihood, they didn't. Consider the many women who have left large corporations to start their own businesses, obviously exhibiting enough confidence to succeed on their own. Judgments about confidence can be inferred only from the way people present themselves, and much of that pre­ sentation is in the form of talk. The CEO of a major corporation told me that he

often has to make decisions in five minutes about

of Talk:

reasonable approach. But my field of research, socio­ linguistics, suggests otherwise. The CEO obviotlsly thinks he knows what ~ confident person sounds like. But his judgment, which may be dead right for some people, may be deq.d wrong for others. Communication isn't as simple as saying what you mean. How you say what you mean is crucial, and differs from one person to the next, because us­ ing language is learned social behavior: How we talk and listen are deeply influenced by cultural ex­ perience. Although we might think that our ways of saying what we mean are natural, we can run into trouble if we interpret and evaluate others as if they necessarily felt the same w,ay we'd feel if we spoke the way they did. Since 1974, I have been researching the influence of linguistic style on conversations and human reDeborah Tannen is University Professor and a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is the...